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Siril, a free astronomical image processing software

Siril is meant to be Iris for Linux (sirI-L). It is an astronomical image processing tool, able to convert, pre-process images, help aligning them automatically or manually, stack them and enhance final images. This page is the page for the new version of Siril.

Who should use Siril?

Siril is targeted to amateur astronomers having acquired images and wanting to process them in a semi-automatic way. It provides a more user-friendly interface than Iris' command line as well as more modern and powerful processing algorithms, but it is not yet as automated as DeepSkyStacker or Registax. It also provides a basic command line to access various processing functions.

Siril is now fully capable to pre-process and process deep sky images. One feature still missing for planetary images processing is image deformation, but it is still capable of registering and processing them in an elegant way. The new star detection registration is perfect for deep sky images, but there are also two automatic translation-only registrations, one more suited for planetary and bright nebula images, based on DFT, and another more simple targetted at deep-sky images, based on PSF on a single reference star. Additionally, a manual alignment capability makes it also well fitted for amateur astronomers having feature-less or bad quality images that automatic tools fail to align properly.

Professional astronomers generally use 32-bit depth images, but Siril uses only 16-bit images internally (except temporary for stacking). Loading 32-bit images is supported but it will degrade them since they will be converted to 16-bit. It can still be useful if the intent is to produce public-friendly pictures.

And more generally, people who want to use free software on free operating systems to process images. Siril can even be used to extract previewed frames from many videos formats. For an overview, see some image processing results, or documentation pages.

News

The software is in released phase, and is now considered stable. If you find bugs and want to report them (please, do!), contact the team using the links at the bottom of this page, or feel free to report them on the bug report page.

October 28, 2015

First stable version available. Its SVN revision is 1037, but it also has an SVN tag: 0.9.0. Stability updates and minor improvements will occur in the dedicated 0.9 branch.

June 10, 2015

New registration method available!! It is now possible to register images with an automatic global star detection tool. The algorithm take into account the translation and the rotation.

April 13, 2015

We have been working hard on accelerating stacking algorithms on multi-core CPUs, giving SER a better support and we are also working on the two main lacks of Siril: taking into account rotation and multi-point in registration, for better deep-sky and planetary registrations. These works are in progress, and will take some weeks to complete.

Many improvements have been done over the previous unmaintained version. The command line has been reactivated in large proportions, see the list of currently available commands on the dedicated Commands page. New commands and features have been and are being developed. For a complete list of features, see the 0.9.0 beta page, the roadmap, or the list of features below.

The roadmap for Siril is being updated for its after-release life. Ideas are stored in the Roadmap page, and the list of known bugs is maintained in the bug tracking page file. The complete changelog is available in the SVN log (not available online), a summary is available in the news section here and in the page of each release, as well as in the ChangeLog file. If you want to contribute, you are welcome!

Start using Siril / Documentation

Siril's works internally with FITS images, unsigned 16-bit per pixel and per channel. All images you want to process with Siril thus needs to be converted using the Conversion tab, except for SER and film sequences which are converted on-the-fly.

For pre-processing, Siril applies master offset/bias, dark and flat images to the current sequence. These master images thus have to be processed before processing the actual image sequence. Siril currently does not support processing multiple sequences at the same time, so each layer of the final image must be processed independently before assembling them into an RGB image.

Only 3-channel colour images assigned to R, G and B are possible in the general workspace (image processing and sequence handling). It is however possible to manipulate several 1-channel image to create a colour composition, such as popular LRGB, RGBHa or SII-Ha-OIII images, with the compositing tool.

Compilation and installation

See Siril installation page. It documents which binary packages you can get and how to build from source if needed, for multiple operating systems. Siril is a free software, licence is GPL3. It will most likely never run or be supported on Windows family operating systems.

Who is behind Siril?

The project leader of this new version is Vincent. He is a computer scientist (PhD), and uses Siril as an amateur to process images from a Canon EOS and a B&W QSI camera on a 410mm telescope.

Cyril is a physicist (PhD), motivating new developments and providing high quality processing algorithms to Siril.